By: Jenna Lang Warford
I’ve had recent conversations with companies that can’t meet staffing requirements because employees who used to make a lower hourly wage are no longer available at that level of compensation. That affects margin, obviously.
— Logan Stout, Founder and Chairman, IDLife
In 2020, direct selling saw an explosion of new distributors as COVID-19 contributed to corporate layoffs, small businesses closing or limiting customers, and shelter-in-place isolation. As everyone in the channel—and the world—tried to wrap their heads around the rapid changes to their lives, some direct selling executives took notice of the sizable scale in the field and responded with effective action to manage the influx.
“We’re focusing on entrepreneurship at the very top levels, focusing on leadership at levels just below that,” MONAT Global President Stuart MacMillan told Social Selling News about the situation in 2020. “The reason is that we had top leaders who came to us saying, ‘Holy smokes. I don’t know what happened. I now have 4,000 people on my team, and I’m running a multimillion-dollar business,’ and they didn’t have the corresponding leadership or entrepreneurship skills.” MONAT’s executive team took action, including offering a leadership course by John Maxwell and entrepreneurship training by Todd Duncan, among other supporting measures.
In 2021, the pandemic added a layer of shifting in the workforce that was unexpected by some in the direct selling channel. The previous year’s mandate that all except “essential personnel” work from home triggered millions of workers to reassess how they spend their time and energy—and the wage they are willing to work for.
Hello direct selling community! I am thrilled to introduce myself as the new Publisher for Social Selling News and am even more excited about the opportunity this will provide me to work with, speak with, and, hopefully soon, meet with you—the driving force behind this exciting and dynamic business channel.
By: Teresa Craighead
“What they are doing in this paper is trying to put forward a logical argument to set up a premise, to analyze it and to draw conclusions. The problem is that they commit some really basic logical errors, and you don’t have to be a logician to understand them.”
—Dr. Anne Coughlan, professor of marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
On October 13-15, 2020, the Direct Selling Association (DSA) held a virtual Legal and Regulatory Seminar that included a session discussing the Andrew Stivers, Douglas Smith, and Ginger Jin paper, “The Alchemy of a Pyramid” with three experts: Dr. Anne Coughlan, the Polk Bros. Chair in Retailing and professor of marketing at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University; Dr. Patrick Brockett, the Gus Wortham Memorial Chair in Risk Management and Insurance at McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin; and Dr. Linda Ferrell, Marketing Department Chair and professor of marketing at Harbert College of Business, Auburn University. Comments in this article are taken from that discussion.
In the July 2020 issue of Social Selling News, we published an article, titled “FTC Reveals True Goals in Research Paper” (page 24), in which we discussed some of the conclusions reached in a paper published by SSRN, an international social sciences research journal.